The Energon Pub

I am a hardcore transformer fan, been so all my life. Just haven't had the cash to start a serious collection yet and I am falling a bit, okay I admit I am waaaay behind the curve compared to everyone else. Now I need help with identifying these following transformers. I don't even know if they're official or just custom made for people with too much money to throw around.

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a23 ... 2211305428

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=201 ... id=&pm_id=

I found them on a Chinese auction site of all places. Hope I can find them on ebay or something. Anyone who can give me any information I highly appreciate it. Working in another country does give you benefits of running into some surprises.

Those two are indeed custom jobs, and not even of Transformers toys. Despite the hodgepodge that the two are, I can spot and name some of the figures they're made from.

The organic looking dinosaur one is made primarily of knock-offs, I know of a toy line that actually featured (shoddy) robots transforming into realistic dinosaurs. The head on that one is the only Transformer part in there, that belongs to Armada or Energon Unicron.

The other one is mostly made of figures I know quite well: they're from the DinoZaurs line by Bandai, which features transforming Dinosaur fossils. Glancing over it, I think it has about every figure of that line in there!

And JelZe does it again!

Yeesh, and to think both of these combiners are going for prices of between 18888 and 28888 yuan (roughtly between 3,000 - 4,600 U.S. Dollars). Can you give me more specific information on the toy line transforming into realistic dinosaurs and where I can get them? Are you sure it's not Beast Wars?

I wouldn't mind taking a look at the Dinozaur toys as well as looking at the prices as they seem to be okay. I checked on ebay but couldn't find too many. Know any good sites to get non-transformer transforming toys? Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

There were actually several toy lines featuring those realistic dinosaurs toys, all cheaply made and the robots were blocky. The last one I've seen stems from... has it really been 5 years? And it's not Beast Wars at all, the US line only had a "Raptor", a T-Rex and Pterasaur.

Wish I could give you more details than that, but they've been released under many names, as Knockoffs tend to do. I do have a gallery of a prime example of what such a toy looks like:

Brachiosaurus-Bot, courtesy of Paul Grant

Thanks! I appreciate your help

About the DinoZaurs toy line, it did get some exposure in the US thanks to the anime, but it was largely overshadowed by Hasbro's Beast Wars. Another good idea is to look under DinoZone, the name the line was released under in Japan. Let me give you a start by linking you to the DinoZone section of a Japanese toy blog I regularly visit:

DinoZone Blogs and Images on Transformer Baka Ichidai.